INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

much as 2.5 million years ago. The tool forms are minimally flaked to have a sharp edge, and
they are called pebble tools or Oldowan tools, after the famous Olduvai Gorge in East Africa
investigated by Louis and Mary Leakey. It is highly likely that the very first tools were made of
perishable materials such as plant fibers or bone. We know that chimps make and use tools in the
wild, such as shaped grass stems for pulling termites out of their mounds and wads of leaves for
sponges to drink water from small pools.
Who made the stone tools? This class will not go into
hominid evolution, which is the realm of physical or
biological anthropology class. Suffice it to say that the
early human-like forms were first discovered in the
early 20th century in South Africa; then the Leakeys
spent 30 years in Tanzania, East Africa, looking for
hominid remains he knew would be there because he
had found the crude-looking but clearly manufactured
stone tools. By the 1970s other now-famous
researchers were discovering more remains, such as
Donald Johanson’s find of the Lucy skeleton in
Ethiopia at the Hadar site. Now we are up to a dozen
species of australopithecines and counting, plus a few
other taxonomic names. We do not know which one, if
any, made the stone tools. Contemporaneous with many of these species at the 2.5 million year
point, when the first stone tools appear, is another species, Homo habilis, which translates to
“handyman” and is supposed to be the toolmaker. Do you need a larger brain and longer
evolutionary history to know how to make tools? Apes have been taught flintknapping, so the
answer is no. Might there be any prejudice against attributing tool-making behavior to hominid
forms that look older or uglier or less like us? Maybe.
What other kind of very early archaeological evidence was found at the Laetoli site? Fossilized
footprints of hominids, excavated by Mary Leakey, demonstrating archaeologically the
bipedalism that the bones also showed. Mary was an archaeologist in England who teamed up
with Louis to do paleoanthropology. The book shows a photo of her digging the footprints (p.
41); she was a colorful character in her own right (show family picture, p. 53, in color in Fagan
1985 of Mary with Louis, boys, dogs).
Where is the Swartkrans site and are there differences in interpretations of its evidence? It is in
South Africa and has produced skull fragments and other hominid fossils. One investigator,
Raymond Dart, who named the original Australopithecus africanus specimen, saw the fragments
as broken in such a way as to suggest that not only were these early human creatures hunting lots
of other animals, but they were hunting their own species as well. The many skulls had the bases
broken away, often seen as a sign of cannibalism because this is how you process animal skulls
from which you want to eat the brains (yummy, and very nutritious too!). Another investigator,
Robert Brain, interpreted them as evidence that something else broke the bones, site formation
processes acting upon them after they were deposited as remains of meals of other carnivores
such as big cats.